Monday, September 29, 2014

BAGHDAD
(AP) — Militants with the Islamic State group tortured and then
publicly killed a human rights lawyer in the Iraqi city of Mosul after
their self-proclaimed religious court ruled that she had abandoned
Islam, the U.N. mission in Iraq said Thursday.

Gunmen with the
group's newly declared police force seized Samira Salih al-Nuaimi last
week in a northeastern district of the Mosul while she was home with her
husband and three children, two people with direct knowledge of the
incident told The Associated Press on Thursday. Al-Nuaimi was taken to a
secret location. After about five days, the family was called by the
morgue to retrieve her corpse, which bore signs of torture, the two
people said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fears for
their safety.

According to the United Nations Assistance Mission
in Iraq, her arrest was allegedly connected to Facebook messages she
posted that were critical of the militants' destruction of religious
sites in Mosul. A statement by the U.N. on Thursday added that al-Nuaimi
was tried in a so-called "Sharia court" for apostasy, after which she
was tortured for five days before the militants sentenced her to "public
execution." Her Facebook page appears to have been removed since her
death.

"By torturing and executing a female human rights' lawyer
and activist, defending in particular the civil and human rights of her
fellow citizens in Mosul, ISIL continues to attest to its infamous
nature, combining hatred, nihilism and savagery, as well as its total
disregard of human decency," Nickolay Mladenov, the U.N. envoy to Iraq,
said in a statement, referring to the group by an acronym. The statement
did not say how she was killed.

Among Muslim hard-liners,
apostasy is thought to be not just conversion from Islam to another
faith, but also committing actions that they believe are so against the
faith that one is considered to have abandoned Islam.

Mosul is the
largest city held by the Islamic State group in the self-declared
"caliphate" it has carved out, bridging northern and eastern Syria with
northern Iraq. Since overrunning the once-diverse city in June, the
group has forced religious minorities to convert to Islam, pay special
taxes or die, causing tens of thousands to flee. The militants have
enforced a strict dress code on women, going so far as to veil the faces
of female mannequins in store fronts.

Street vendors must skirt the law to make a living.

Each
afternoon in Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood, 70-year-old Cuala
resumes her quiet game of cat-and-mouse with police. After spending a
few hours openly hawking cool drinks or hot chocolates from a cart, the
street vendor (who declined to give her last name because of legal
concerns) stocks an unmarked cooler with tamales, making furtive lunch
sales to customers in the know. The stealth tactic reduces her profits,
but lessens the chance that she will be arrested and ticketed: While the
sale of drinks and packaged desserts is legal, street vendors like
Cuala are prohibited from selling prepared foods in Chicago.

Though
carts offering tamales, elotes, cut fruit and other treats are a common
sight on Chicago streets, the Windy City is one of the few major
metropolises that won’t grant such vendors business licenses, citing the
difficulty of regulation and potential health concerns. As a result,
street vendors, many of whom are poor immigrants, are subject to
harassment from police, arrest and punishing fines of up to $1,000.

Some,
like Cuala, resort to subterfuge; others vend only in the early
morning, when police officers known for targeting vendors aren’t on the
beat; others dash off the street whenever a police car approaches.

Whatever
the strategy, the result is the same: Vendors, many of whom have
already been shut out of the formal economy because of their age,
childcare responsibilities, language barriers or immigration status, are
forced to remain in the shadows. Street vendors and their advocates say
that the ongoing threat of arrest represents a major barrier to growing
vending businesses enough to make a decent living. It also takes a
psychological toll on vendors.

Cuala once worked temporary jobs,
but can no longer get hired: “They don’t want anybody old,” she says.
She began selling tamales seven years ago. But one day last year, as she
was handing tamales to a customer, a police officer grabbed them, threw
them back at her and threatened to arrest her if she continued to sell
on 26th street, the bustling thoroughfare that runs through Little
Village.

Since then, Cuala has been in “constant fear” when police
pass by and sells her tamales more surreptitiously. But her new
strategy can yield as little as $80 each day, she says, whereas when she
sold in the open, she made up to $200. The result, she says, is that
it’s now impossible to save money, and she and two adult nephews whom
she lives with must get by “day by day.”

All this could change
soon. Arguing that street vending is an inextricable part of the fabric
of city life, a coalition of vendors, labor activists and community
groups are advocating a City Council ordinance that would legalize
vending.

Every day, there are populist uprisings, both large and small, all across this country.

My
father, W.F. "High" Hightower, was a populist. Only, he didn't know it.
Didn't know the word, much less the history or anything about
populism's democratic ethos. My father was not philosophical, but he had
a phrase that he used to express the gist of his political beliefs:
"Everybody does better when everybody does better ."

Before
the populists of the late 1800s gave its instinctive rebelliousness a
name, it had long been established as a defining trait of our national
character: The 1776 rebellion was not only against King George III's
government but against the corporate tyranny of such British monopolists
as the East India Trading Company.

The establishment certainly
doesn't celebrate the populist spirit, and our educational system avoids
bothering students with our vibrant, human story of constant battles,
big and small, mounted by "little people" against ... well, against the
establishment. The Keepers of the Corporate Order take care to avoid
even a suggestion that there is an important political pattern -- a
historic continuum -- that connects Thomas Paine's radical democracy
writings in the late 1700s to Shays' Rebellion in 1786, to strikes by
mill women and carpenters in the early 1800s, to Jefferson's 1825
warning about the rising aristocracy of banks and corporations "riding
and ruling over the plundered ploughman," to the launching of the
women's suffrage movement at Seneca Falls in 1848, to the maverick
Texans who outlawed banks in their 1845 state constitution, to the
bloody and ultimately successful grassroots struggle for the abolition
of slavery, and to the populist movement itself, plus the myriad
rebellions that followed right into our present day.

WHAT POPULISM
IS NOT: An empty word for lazy reporters to attach to any angry spasm
of popular discontent. (And it's damn sure not Sarah Palin and today's
clique of Koch-funded, corporate-hugging, tea party Republicans.)

WHAT
IT IS: For some 238 years, it has been the chief political impulse in
America's body politick -- determinedly democratic, vigilantly resistant
to the oppressive power of corporations and Wall Street, committed to
grassroots percolate-up economics, and firmly rooted in my old daddy's
concept of "Everybodyness," recognizing that we're all in this together.

Although
it was organized into a formal movement for only about 25 years,
Populism has had an outsized, long-term, and ongoing impact on our
culture, public policies, economic structure and governing systems. Even
though its name is rarely used and its history largely hidden, and
neither major party will embrace it (much less become it), there are
many more people today whose inherent political instincts are populist,
rather than conservative or liberal.

Yet the pundits and politicos
frame our choices in terms of that narrow con-lib ideological spectrum,
ignoring the fact that most of us are neither, or a bit of both. Our
nation's true political spectrum is not right to left, but top to
bottom. People can locate themselves along this vertical rich-to-poor
spread, for this is not a theoretical positioning: It's based on our
real-world experience with money and power. This is America's real
politics.

The
price of Amazon's success is worker exploitation, the destruction of
local enterprise and the creation of a corporate oligarch.

Even
by the anything-goes ethical code of the corporate jungle, Amazon.com’s
alpha male, Jeff Bezos, is considered a ruthless predator by businesses
that deal with him. As overlord of Amazon, by far the largest online
marketer in the world (with more sales than the next nine US online
retailers combined), Bezos has the monopoly power to stalk, weaken, and
even kill off retail competitors—going after such giants as Barnes &
Noble and Walmart and draining the lifeblood from hundreds of smaller
Main Street shops. He also goes for the throats of both large and small
businesses that supply the millions of products his online behemoth
sells. They’re lured into Amazon by its unparalleled database of some
200 million customers, but once in, they face unrelenting pressure to
lower what they charge Amazon for their products, compelled by the
company to give it much better deals than other retailers can extract.

Lest
you think predator is too harsh a term, consider the metaphor Bezos
himself chose when explaining how to get small book publishers to cough
up deep discounts as the price for getting their titles listed on the
Amazon website. As related by Businessweek reporter Brad Stone,
Bezos instructed his negotiators to stalk them “the way a cheetah
would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Bezos’ PR machine tried to claim this
sneering comment was just a little “Jeff joke,” but they couldn’t laugh
it off, for a unit dubbed the “Gazelle Project” had actually been set
up inside Amazon.

This top-level team focused on doing exactly
what Bezos instructed: Pursue vulnerable small publishers and squeeze
their wholesale prices to Amazon down to the point of no profit, thus
allowing the online retailer to underprice every other book peddler.
When Stone exposed Gazelle last year in his book, The Everything Store,
the project was suddenly rebranded with a bloodless name—“Small
Publisher Negotiation Program”—but its mission remains the same.

Today,
Amazon sells a stunning 40 percent of all new books, up from 12 percent
five years ago. It is even more dominant in the digital book market,
which is fast catching up to the sales level of physical books and is
widely perceived as the future of publishing. Electronic book sales were
non-existent just seven years ago; today about a third of all books
sold are e-books, and Amazon sells two-thirds of those. Of course,
Amazon also owns Kindle, the largest-selling device for reading digital
books.

With his market clout, deep-pocket financing, and ferocious
price-cutting, Bezos has forced hundreds of America’s independ ent
bookstores to close and has humbled the superstore book chains that
once preyed on the independents and dominated the market. Borders, the
second-largest chain, succumbed to bankruptcy in 2011. Now Barnes &
Noble, the largest brick-and-mortar bookstore, is stumbling. It has
lost millions of dollars, closed dozens of stores, shrunk most others,
and suffered the embarrassment of its own board chairman frantically
dumping big chunks of Barnes & Noble stock.

There
have undoubtedly been stable periods in human history, but you and your
parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents never lived through one,
and neither will any children or grandchildren you may have or come to
have. Everything has been changing continuously, profoundly -- from the
role of women to the nature of agriculture. For the past couple of
hundred years, change has been accelerating in both magnificent and
nightmarish ways.

Yet when we argue for change, notably changing
our ways in response to climate change, we’re arguing against people who
claim we’re disrupting a stable system. They insist that we’re rocking
the boat unnecessarily.

I say: rock that boat. It’s a lifeboat;
maybe the people in it will wake up and start rowing. Those who think
they’re hanging onto a stable order are actually clinging to the
wreckage of the old order, a ship already sinking, that we need to leave
behind.

As you probably know, the actual oceans are rising -- almost eight inches since 1880, and that’s only going to accelerate. They’re also acidifying,
because they’re absorbing significant amounts of the carbon we continue
to pump into the atmosphere at record levels. The ice that covers the
polar seas is shrinking, while the ice shields that cover Antarctica and Greenland are melting. The water locked up in all the polar ice, as it’s unlocked by heat, is going to raise sea levels staggeringly, possibly by as much as 200 feet at some point in the future, how distant we do not know. In the temperate latitudes, warming seas breed fiercer hurricanes.

The
oceans are changing fast, and for the worse. Fish stocks are dying off,
as are shellfish. In many acidified oceanic regions, their shells are
actually dissolving
or failing to form, which is one of the scariest, most nightmarish
things I’ve ever heard. So don’t tell me that we’re rocking a stable
boat on calm seas. The glorious 10,000-year period of stable climate in
which humanity flourished and then exploded to overrun the Earth and all
its ecosystems is over.

The loudest voice in favor of eliminating pit bulls in Canada is probably Barbara Kay, a journalist with the National Post.
Her campaign is largely successful: Canada has some of the most
punitive breed-specific laws (BSL) in the world. And she told me
proudly, in an email:

My primary source, you will not
be surprised to learn, is animal-industry historian and investigative
reporter for more than 40 years, Merritt Clifton, until recently editor
of Animal People News and now editor of his own site, Animals 24/7. My other primary source is Colleen Lynn of Dogsbite.org.

Colleen
Lynn is a menace; she's a web designer who was once bitten by a dog,
and has been on a vicious campaign to eliminate the pit bull type ever
since. Still, she makes no pretense to academic credibility. Merritt
Clifton, on the other hand, very much pretends to be an eminent scholar,
and is truly dangerous.

In the first few minutes of the video linked here, for instance, you will see him pronounce: "I have more than a hundred peer-reviewed publications."

This
would seem truly impressive -- that's a hefty body of published work.
It's troubling, however, that not one of these publications shows up in a
search on JSTOR, the comprehensive academic database online. Nor can I
find a single example of his copious oeuvre in Harvard's library, which
can also be searched online. One hundred publications, admirably
invisible.

I finally found one. Clifton mentions Asian Biomedicine
in the video, and floating around the internet is a single article that
this obscure journal published in 2011. The journal's own website seems
to have vanished, but they do say on their Facebook page that they are "peer-reviewed." Perhaps there are a hundred such articles? Probably not: a sandbox draft of somebody trying desperately to get Clifton and his projects on Wikipedia lists one academic publication. This one.

The
video is posted on a blog maintained by Josh Liddy, an activist against
BSL, who notes that Clifton's claims are "dubious." Mr. Liddy is far
too polite. These claims are "fictional."

From Truth Out:http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26202-sea-change-the-ecological-disaster-that-nobody-seesBy Richard SchiffmanThursday, 18 September 2014On
September 21, in what is being advance-billed as the largest climate
march in history, thousands of protesters will converge on New York City
to focus public attention on the slow-motion train wreck of global
warming. But while Americans are becoming increasingly aware that our
industrial civilization is destabilizing the earth's climate, fewer know
about another environmental disaster-in-the-making: the crisis of the
global oceans.

Experts warn that we are currently facing an
extinction event in the oceans which may rival the "Great Death" of the
Permian age 250 million years ago, when 95 percent of marine species
died out due to a combination of warming, acidification, loss of oxygen
and habitat - all conditions that are rife today.

Within
the past half century the oceans have been transformed from the
planet's most productive bioregion into arguably its most abused and
critically endangered. That is the conclusion of a report
issued earlier this summer by the Global Ocean Commission, a private
think tank consisting of marine scientists, diplomats and business
people, which makes policy recommendations to governments.

The
report catalogues a grim laundry list of environmental ills. Commercial
fish stocks worldwide are being overexploited and are close to collapse;
coral reefs are dying due to ocean acidification - and may be gone by
midcentury; vast dead zones are proliferating in the Baltic and the Gulf
of Mexico caused by an influx of nitrogen and phosphorous from
petroleum-based fertilizers; non-biodegradable plastic trash -
everything from tiny micro-plastic beads to plastic bags and discarded
fishing gear - is choking many coastal nurseries where fish spawn; and
increased oil and gas drilling in deep waters is spewing pollution and
posing the risk of catastrophic spills like the Deepwater Horizon
disaster which dumped an estimated 4.2 million barrels of petroleum into
the Gulf of Mexico during a five-month period in 2010.

Yet these worrying trends have failed to spark public indignation. It may be a matter of "out of sight, out of mind."

"If
fish were trees, and we saw them being clear-cut, we would be upset,"
renowned oceanographer Carl Safina observed in an interview with
Truthout. "But the ocean is invisible to most people, an alien world."
It is hard for those of us who only see ocean life when it ends up on
our dinner plates to get worked up about its destruction, Safina said.

Nevertheless,
this world under the waves is vital to our survival, according to
Sylvia Earle, former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) chief scientist. "The ocean is alive; it is a living minestrone
soup with an even greater diversity of life than on the land," Earle
told Truthout. "It is where most of our oxygen is created and carbon is
taken out of the atmosphere. With every breath you take, you need to
thank the ocean."

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

After years of trying in San Francisco and LA I found the struggle
wasn't worth the pain and Dallas is an easier place to live. Now if we
can just down size out of the huge place we were sold on when moving
here the journey to finding the right level to live in comfort while
enjoying something described by a Swedish word "Lagom." Lagom is
associated with moderation, the word means not too much, not too little,
but just the right amount. It typically refers to the etiquette of
taking your share. From Huffington Post:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/18/letting-go_n_5812598.htmlBy Catherine Pearson09/18/2014For 23 years, Barbara Bentree made Los Angeles her home, thriving on the bustle of city life.A
singer who studied music education in college, Bentree moved to
California in her early 20s with, as she put it, "stars in her eyes."
She found work teaching in private schools, and in her spare time
performed in one-woman shows, sang on various studio recordings and even
appeared as a singer in several episodes of TV shows, including "Ally
McBeal," "Days of Our Lives" and "Wings." Through teaching, she began to
forge connections with people in the production world, and was soon
being referred to work with children in the entertainment industry.

"I
was young and single and really excited about being in a big
metropolitan area," Bentree said of those early years in Los Angeles.
"To participate in movies and television was very, very exciting."Eventually,
Bentree was recruited to work on "The Mickey Mouse Club" TV show as a
music producer, auditioning and helping to train Mouseketeers, including
famous alums Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears. She worked in
various production and music director roles for big networks, like
Disney, and eventually met and fell in love with her husband, John
Rangel, a pianist and composer, who relocated to Los Angeles from
Florida in the early 90s to be closer to her. They married two years
ago, after decades together.

The couple lived along the city's
striking coastline, in beachfront areas such as Pacific Palisades and
Malibu -- which were "wonderful" and "beautiful," Bentree said, but very
expensive. To keep up with the cost of their rented apartment, Bentree
worked on several projects that were lucrative, but not artistically
satisfying.

"When I was young and inexperienced, all of the TV and movie work was lucrative and
exciting," she said, but gigs as a studio singer crooning commercial
jingles for cat food companies became less and less appealing. At one
point, she looked at her life and realized she was spending 10 hours a
week in the car, commuting back and forth to work on a particular
project.

"It was a little nutty, and there was a lot of running
around," Bentree said. "When I turned 50, I started to have this feeling
of, 'Los Angeles is not the town for me to grow old in.'"

Monday, September 22, 2014

Why
do so many poor people eat junk food, fail to budget properly, show no
ambition? Linda Tirado knew exactly why… because she was one of them.
Here, in an extract from her book, Hand to Mouth, she tells her story in
her own words

In
the autumn of 2013 I was in my first term of school in a decade. I had
two jobs; my husband, Tom, was working full-time; and we were raising
our two small girls. It was the first time in years that we felt like
maybe things were looking like they’d be OK for a while.

After a
gruelling shift at work, I was unwinding online when I saw a question
from someone on a forum I frequented: Why do poor people do things that
seem so self-destructive? I thought I could at least explain what I’d
seen and how I’d reacted to the pressures of being poor. I wrote my answer to the question, hit post, and didn’t think more about it for at least a few days. This is what it said:

Why I make terrible decisions, or, poverty thoughts

There’s
no way to structure this coherently. They are random observations that
might help explain the mental processes. But often, I think that we look
at the academic problems of poverty and have no idea of the why. We
know the what and the how, and we can see systemic problems, but it’s
rare to have a poor person actually explain it on their own behalf. So
this is me doing that, sort of.

Rest is a luxury for the rich. I
get up at 6am, go to school (I have a full course load, but I only have
to go to two in-person classes), then work, then I get the kids, then
pick up my husband, then have half an hour to change and go to Job 2. I
get home from that at around 12.30am, then I have the rest of my classes
and work to tend to. I’m in bed by 3am. This isn’t every day, I have
two days off a week from each of my obligations. I use that time to
clean the house and soothe Mr Martini [her partner], see the kids for
longer than an hour and catch up on schoolwork.

Those nights I’m
in bed by midnight, but if I go to bed too early I won’t be able to stay
up the other nights because I’ll fuck my pattern up, and I drive an
hour home from Job 2 so I can’t afford to be sleepy. I never get a day
off from work unless I am fairly sick. It doesn’t leave you much room to
think about what you are doing, only to attend to the next thing and
the next. Planning isn’t in the mix.

When I was pregnant the first
time, I was living in a weekly motel for some time. I had a mini-fridge
with no freezer and a microwave. I was on WIC [government-funded
nutritional aid for women, infants and children]. I ate peanut butter
from the jar and frozen burritos because they were 12 for $2. Had I had a
stove, I couldn’t have made beef burritos that cheaply. And I needed
the meat, I was pregnant. I might not have had any prenatal care, but I
am intelligent enough to eat protein and iron while knocked up.

I couldn't go to this march nor could I afford to take the time to go to the Dallas Pride Day events.Over the last year I have been overwhelmed with personal disasters that require me to devote my energy to dealing with.

Politicians
don’t understand. They just smile and hold the hand of big business.
And so we march. Because destroying the Earth is not a good idea. It
really isn’t

Do I really have to march? It’s actually a serious question: I mean, marching’s rather ... military,
isn’t it? Bit aggressive. Bit too much like what the baddies on the
other side would do, don’t you think? Wouldn’t you rather saunter? Or
stroll? Mince, even? A hop, a skip or a jump – anything but stern-faced,
humorless marching. And let’s face it: we’re probably going to need a sense of humor.

Remember 15 February 2003? If you’re taking the trouble to read this, then you probably went to an anti-war march that day.
Didn’t turn out so well, did it? Nothing really changed. The “largest
protest event in human history”, as we remember it today, was
effectively ignored. That left a nasty taste. It might even have put you
off the idea of protesting forever. The marching boots were thrown to
the back of the cupboard and you went into a major sulk. Maybe you even
wrote a song about it. Yeah, that’ll tell ‘em. You wrote the words:

If you don’t like it then leaveor use your right to protest on the street.Yeah, use your right –but don’t imagine that it’s heard.No: not whilst c***ts are still running the world.– “Running the World” (2006)

And you thought: “Yes! Smash the system!” And then ... time passed. Until you got this email:

On
Sunday, Sept 21, a climate march through midtown Manhattan will kick
off a week of high-profile climate events in the Big Apple. Promoted as
an effort to bring unprecedented attention to climate change, the
gathering comes just as international climate negotiations ramp up in a
major push toward a new global accord. The People’s Climate March, being called the ‘largest climate march in history’ by organizers, will potentially draw over a hundred thousand people
to walk through Manhattan and show a level of demand for action not
seen since the era of Civil Rights marches and anti-Vietnam protests.

Can
you be arsed? Do you risk being disappointed again? Or do you sit this
one out? I mean, climate change is a bit old-hat now, isn’t it? And some
people say it doesn’t even exist – people like ... Nigel Lawson.
(A note for non-British readers: you may be more familiar with his
daughter, the TV chef Nigella Lawson. The fact that he gave his daughter
a “feminized” version of his own name tells you all you need to know
about him, really.)

Thursday, September 18, 2014

The
climate-change movement is making little headway against corporate
vested interests, says the author of Shock Doctrine. But how does she
think her new book, This Changes Everything, will help galvanise people?

Naomi Klein
is the star of the new American left. At 44, the writer and activist
has twice written blockbusters combining ground-level reporting and
economic analysis that challenged people to take a hard look at what
they took for granted: their shopping choices, America’s place in the
world, and the devastating effects of arcane trade policy and rampant
free market ideology. Along the way she gained a following that spans
academics, celebrities and street and factory protesters.

Her first book, No Logo,
about the power of brands over sweatshop workers in Asia who made the
products (and the consumers in America and Europe who consumed them),
politicised a generation of twentysomethings. It became the handbook of
the anti- globalisation protests, and inspired two Radiohead albums.

Seven years later, her second book, Shock Doctrine,
analysed how wars, coups and natural disasters were used as a pretext
to impose so-called “free market” measures. Now Klein is back, writing
about capitalism, only this time the fate of the entire planet is at
stake. With her new book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs The
Climate, Klein hopes to set off the kind of powerful mass movement that
could – finally – produce the radical changes needed to avoid a
global warming catastrophe and fix capitalism at the same time. She
argues that we have all been thinking about the climate crisis the wrong
way around: it’s about capitalism – not carbon – the extreme
anti-regulatory version that has seized global economies since the 1980s
and has set us on a course of destruction and deepening inequality.

“I
think we are on a collision course,” she says. Twenty-five years ago,
when the first climate scientist was called to testify to Congress and
make global warming a policy challenge, there might have still been time
for big industries to shrink their carbon footprints. But governments
at the time were seized with the idea that there should be no restraints
on industry. “During that time,” Klein writes, “we also expanded the
road from a two lane, carbon-spewing highway to a six-lane
superhighway.”

When we meet in her Toronto home, Klein is juggling
a schedule that combines the standard author book readings and
television interviews and planning for an event in New York City billed
as the biggest climate march ever seen. Her husband, film-maker Avi
Lewis, is out shooting a companion film due for release in January. The two text back and forth during our chat.

On
Sept. 22 and 23, the United Nations will host separate daylong
conferences on two issues of incalculable importance to the future of
humanity: population and climate change.
Though the two meetings will take place just one day apart, neither is
likely to refer to the other. And that will be a missed opportunity,
because scientific research increasingly affirms that the two issues are
linked in many ways.

The population gathering in the General
Assembly on Sept. 22 will mark the 20th anniversary of the landmark
International Conference on Population and Development held in Cairo in
1994. The next day’s summit has been convened by U.N. Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon for government and business leaders to brainstorm ideas for
addressing climate change.

The coincidence of these meetings
occurring a day apart offers a teachable moment for the global
decision-makers gathering in New York. Actions to promote the well-being
of women might produce mutually reinforcing benefits in both areas.

Population,
the lives and status of women, and climate change are rarely linked at
the United Nations — or in any other intergovernmental conversations,
for that matter. Intuitively, it’s easy to understand that the growth of
world population from 1 billion people at the start of the Industrial
Revolution to 7.3 billion today has something to do with the
accumulation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere.

But most of the climate change the world is currently
experiencing stems from decades of carbon-intense development by the
world’s wealthier countries. These countries’ populations are growing
much more slowly (and in a few cases not at all), compared to those of
poorer countries with low greenhouse-gas emissions. So what’s population
got to do with climate change today?

That’s a question
researchers are beginning to answer. Published science presents growing
evidence for climate-population linkage that is complex, far more
nuanced than the conventional “rich-versus-poor” debate, and worth
working to understand.

HAMBURG, Germany — Europe is living through a new wave of anti-Semitism. The president of Germany’s Central Council of Jews calls it the worst the Continent has seen since World War II.
He may well be right. Attacks on synagogues are an almost weekly
occurrence, and openly anti-Semitic chants are commonplace on
well-attended marches from London to Rome. And yet it is here, in
Germany, where the rise in anti-Semitism is most historically painful.

On
Sunday, thousands of people marched through Berlin in response, and
heard both Chancellor Angela Merkel and President Joachim Gauck denounce the resurgence in anti-Jewish hatred.

We’ve
seen this before, of course. But there’s an important difference this
time. The new anti-Semitism does not originate solely with the typical
white-supremacist neo-Nazi; instead, the ugly truth that many in Europe
don’t want to confront is that much of the anti-Jewish animus originates
with European people of Muslim background.

Until
recently, Germany has been unwilling to discuss this trend. Germans
have always seen Muslim anti-Semitism as a less problematic version of
the “original” version, and therefore a distraction from the well-known
problem of anti-Jewish sentiment within a majority of society.

And
yet the German police have noted a disturbing rise in the number of
people of Arabic and Turkish descent arrested on suspicion of
anti-Semitic acts in recent years, especially over the last several
months. After noticing an alarming uptick in anti-Semitic sentiment
among immigrant students, the German government is considering a special
fund for Holocaust education.

Of
course, anti-Semitism didn’t originate with Europe’s Muslims, nor are
they its only proponents today. The traditional anti-Semitism of
Europe’s far right persists. So, too, does that of the far left, as a
negative byproduct of sympathy for the Palestinian
liberation struggle. There’s also an anti-Semitism of the center, a
subcategory of the sort of casual anti-Americanism and anticapitalism
that many otherwise moderate Europeans espouse.

But
the rise of Muslim anti-Semitism is responsible for the recent change
in the tone of hate in Germany. Until recently, the country’s
anti-Semitism has been largely coded and anonymous. Messages might be
spray-painted on walls at night; during the day, though, it would be
rare to hear someone shout, as protesters did in Berlin in July, “Jews
to the gas!” Another popular slogan at this and other rallies was “Jew,
coward pig, come out and fight alone!” — shouted just yards from
Berlin’s main Holocaust memorial. And this is the difference today: An
anti-Semitism that is not only passionate, but also unaware of, or
indifferent to, Germany’s special history.

Richard
Branson has pledged $3bn to fight climate change, and delivered just
$230m. Naomi Klein looks at the 'greenwashing' of big business and its
effects – on the planet, and our own bodies

I denied climate change
for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening, sure. But I
stayed pretty hazy on the details and only skimmed most news stories. I
told myself the science was too complicated and the environmentalists
were dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing
wrong with the shiny card in my wallet attesting to my "elite"
frequent-flyer status.

A great many of us engage in this kind of
denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or maybe we do
really look, but then we forget. We engage in this odd form of
on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We
deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis
will change everything.

And we are right. If we continue on our
current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, major cities
will drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas; our
children will spend much of their lives fleeing and recovering from
vicious storms and extreme droughts. Yet we continue all the same.

What
is wrong with us? I think the answer is far more simple than many have
led us to believe: we have not done the things needed to cut emissions
because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism,
the reigning ideology for the entire period we have struggled to find a
way out of this crisis. We are stuck, because the actions that would
give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and benefit the vast
majority – are threatening to an elite minority with a stranglehold over
our economy, political process and media.

That problem might not
have been insurmountable had it presented itself at another point in our
history. But it is our collective misfortune that governments and
scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to greenhouse gas
emissions in 1988 – the exact year that marked the dawning of
"globalisation". The numbers are striking: in the 1990s, as the market
integration project ramped up, global emissions were going up an average
of 1% a year; by the 2000s, with "emerging markets" such as China fully
integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had sped up
disastrously, reaching 3.4% a year.

That rapid growth rate has
continued, interrupted only briefly, in 2009, by the world financial
crisis. What the climate needs now is a contraction in humanity's use of
resources; what our economic model demands is unfettered expansion.
Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of
nature.

'Reports from the future' warn of floods, storms and searing heat in campaign for climate change summit

The
1972 book Limits to Growth, which predicted our civilisation would
probably collapse some time this century, has been criticised as
doomsday fantasy since it was published. Back in 2002, self-styled
environmental expert Bjorn Lomborg consigned it to the “dustbin of history”.It doesn’t belong there. Research from the University of Melbourne
has found the book’s forecasts are accurate, 40 years on. If we
continue to track in line with the book’s scenario, expect the early
stages of global collapse to start appearing soon.

Limits to Growth was commissioned by a think tank called the Club of Rome.
Researchers working out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
including husband-and-wife team Donella and Dennis Meadows, built a
computer model to track the world’s economy and environment. Called
World3, this computer model was cutting edge. The task was
very ambitious. The team tracked industrialisation, population, food,
use of resources, and pollution. They modelled data up to 1970, then
developed a range of scenarios out to 2100, depending on whether
humanity took serious action on environmental and resource issues. If
that didn’t happen, the model predicted “overshoot and collapse” – in
the economy, environment and population – before 2070. This was called
the “business-as-usual” scenario.

The book’s central point, much
criticised since, is that “the earth is finite” and the quest for
unlimited growth in population, material goods etc would eventually lead
to a crash.

So were they right? We decided to check in with those
scenarios after 40 years. Dr Graham Turner gathered data from the UN
(its department of economic and social affairs, Unesco, the food and
agriculture organisation, and the UN statistics yearbook). He also
checked in with the US national oceanic and atmospheric administration,
the BP statistical review, and elsewhere. That data was plotted alongside the Limits to Growth scenarios.

The
results show that the world is tracking pretty closely to the Limits to
Growth “business-as-usual” scenario. The data doesn’t match up with
other scenarios.

These graphs show real-world data (first from the
MIT work, then from our research), plotted in a solid line. The dotted
line shows the Limits to Growth “business-as-usual” scenario out to
2100. Up to 2010, the data is strikingly similar to the book’s
forecasts.

The
politics of climate change are shifting. After decades of halfhearted
government efforts to stop global warming, and the failure of the “Big
Green” NGOs to do much of anything about it, new voices — and new
strategies — have taken the lead in the war against fossil fuels.

Jeremy
Brecher, a freelance writer, historian, organizer and radio host based
in Connecticut, has documented the environmental movement’s turn toward
direct action and grass-roots activism. A scholar of American workers’
movements and author of the acclaimed labor history “Strike!,” Brecher
argues that it’s time for green activists to address the social and
economic impacts of climate change and for unions to start taking global
warming seriously.

His latest book, “Climate Insurgency: A
Strategy Against Doom,” which will be released early next year by
Paradigm Publishers, examines the structural causes of our climate
conundrum and calls for a “global nonviolent constitutional insurgency”
to force environmental action from below. Brecher spoke to Salon about
his vision for dealing with global warming, the changing face of
environmental activism, and why he thinks the People’s Climate March in
New York on Sep. 21 is so important.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Around
the world, we’re familiar with insurgencies where an armed group
resists the government and says that it does not legitimately have the
authority to make law and govern some area or some group of people. And
the characteristic of an insurgency is that it denies the legitimacy or
legal right of those who claim to be the legitimate authorities to rule.

The
concept of nonviolent insurgency is of a kind of social movement where
the same basic claim is made: that those who claim the right to rule
actually don’t have the right to rule, but where the means of
challenging their power is not an armed insurgency but is rather what’s
come to be called “people’s power,” or mass civil disobedience or civil
resistance. And so a nonviolent insurgency may sound paradoxical, but in
fact it is quite a common thing around the world and happens a lot and
has happened a lot in the past.

The
oceans are boiling, freelance journalists’ heads are getting lopped
off, and there’s not the slightest sign of resistance to income
inequality so out of control it would worry Cornelius Vanderbilt. Yet
the Internet’s politically-correct “social justice warriors” are
dedicating their formidable energies into attacking pissant
trivialities.

Anyone who doubts that online slacktivists have
their heads so far up their collective asses that they can’t see
daylight need only read up on the controversy over Undercover Colors,
which is a nail polish that allows women (or men, but they’re not the
target audience) to discreetly discover whether their drink has been
spiked by one of several common “date rape” drugs.

(My advice to
women: if you’re at a party or with a guy so sketchy that you think you
may have been slipped a mickey, don’t bother with the fancy polish. Just
scoot. You don’t want to be there anyway.)

Better safe than sorry, right?

Wrong.

“Anything that puts the onus on women to ‘discreetly’ keep from being raped misses the point,” writes Jessica Valenti, a once-influential feminist blogger whose hammer-to-the-skull-obvious post-motherhood columns for The Guardian
add to the case for automatically censoring any piece of writing by a
parent about their children. “We should be trying to stop rape, not just
individually avoid it.”

Um, what?

Valenti is serious about this: “So long as it isn’t me
isn’t an effective strategy to end rape. ‘Undercover Colors’ polish and
products like it only offer the veneer of equality and safety. And
that’s simply not good enough.”

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Late-summer
2014 has brought uncomfortable news for residents of the US
Southwest—and I'm not talking about 109-degree heat in population
centers like Phoenix.

A new study
by Cornell University, the University of Arizona, and the US Geological
Survey researchers looked at the deep historical record (tree rings,
etc.) and the latest climate change models to estimate the likelihood of
major droughts in the Southwest over the next century. The results are
as soothing as a thick wool sweater on a midsummer desert hike.

The
researchers concluded that odds of a decadelong drought are "at least
80 percent." The chances of a "megadrought," one lasting 35 or more
years, stands at somewhere between 20 percent and 50 percent, depending
on how severe climate change turns out to be. And the prospects for an
"unprecedented 50-year megadrought"—one "worse than anything seen during
the last 2000 years"­—checks in at a nontrivial 5 to 10 percent.

To
the right there's a map, pulled from the study, showing that the swath
of land in question and its risk of a 35-year drought. It extends from
Southern California clear to West Texas, encompassing population centers
like San Diego, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque, along with a large
chunk of the troubled US-Mexico border. (Note that in northern Mexico,
drought prospects are even higher.)

The
researchers analyzed satellite measurements of the Earth's mass and
found that the region's aquifers had undergone a
much-larger-than-expected drawdown over the past decade—the region's
farms and municipalities responded to drought-reduced flows from the
Colorado River by dropping wells and tapping almost 53 million acre-feet
of underground water between December 2004 and November 2013—equal to
about 1.5 full Lake Meads drained off in just nine years, a rate the
study's lead researcher, Jay Famiglietti, calls "alarming."

The climate change march
in New York on Sept. 21, expected to draw as many as 200,000 people, is
one of the last gasps of conventional liberalism’s response to the
climate crisis. It will take place two days before the actual gathering of world leaders
in New York called by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to discuss the
November 2015 U.N. Climate Conference in Paris. The marchers will
dutifully follow the route laid down by the New York City police. They
will leave Columbus Circle, on West 59th Street and Eighth Avenue, at
11:30 a.m. on a Sunday and conclude on 11th Avenue between West 34th and
38th streets. No one will reach the United Nations, which is located on
the other side of Manhattan, on the East River beyond First Avenue—at
least legally. There will be no speeches. There is no list of demands.
It will be a climate-themed street fair.

The march, because its demands are amorphous, can be joined by anyone. This is intentional. But as activist Anne Petermann
has pointed out, this also means some of the groups backing the march
are little more than corporate fronts. The Climate Group, for example,
which endorses the march, includes among its members and sponsors BP,
China Mobile, Dow Chemical Co., Duke Energy, HSBC, Goldman Sachs,
JPMorgan Chase and Greenstone. The Environmental Defense Fund, which
says it “work[s] with companies rather than against them” and which is
calling on its members to join the march, has funding from the oil and
gas industry and supports fracking as a form of alternative energy.
These faux environmental organizations are designed to neutralize
resistance. And their presence exposes the march’s failure to adopt a
meaningful agenda or pose a genuine threat to power.

“The
march is symbolic,” said Kevin Zeese of Popular Resistance when I
reached him by phone, “but we are past the time of symbolism. What we
need is direct action against the United Nations during the meeting.
This should include blockades and disruption of the meeting itself. We
need to highlight the fact that the United Nations has sold out to
corporate interests. At U.N. meetings on climate change you see
corporate logos on display. During the last meeting on climate change in
Poland, the U.N. held a simultaneous conference to promote coal as a
clean energy source. These U.N. meetings have become corporate trade
shows where discussions on climate are hijacked to promote corporate
interests. Barack Obama has announced he will continue the U.S. stance
of only calling for voluntary climate goals in advance of the upcoming
climate summit in Paris next year.”

The fossil fuel industry and
corporations, from ExxonMobil to Koch Industries, underwrite political
campaigns and author our legislation. They have stacked the courts with
their judges and the airwaves with their apologists. They fund our
scientific research and have effectively silenced dissidents. This
corporate reach extends to the United Nations. Companies set up
exhibition halls at U.N. climate summits promoting various corporate
schemes to profit from the climate crisis, from “clean” coal and biofuel
to nuclear power and carbon trading. Those who attempt to offer a
counter narrative, especially after the disruptions at the climate
summit in Copenhagen in 2009, are swiftly silenced by U.N. security.
Fences and security barriers now ring heavily guarded U.N. climate
conferences. Protesters are herded into police-controlled “free speech”
zones outside—like the march in New York—and ruthlessly dealt with if
they deviate from the approved routes or make their voices heard among
the delegates. The U.N. security at climate summits, which includes
physically removing journalists so they cannot photograph or document
protests that are shut down by force, is so absolute that the U.N.
demands preapproved wording for T-shirts worn at its gatherings. The
elites, whether in Congress or attending U.N. summits, have no intention
of cutting off their access to wealth, power and privilege. They know
where the money is. They know what they have to do to get it. And we are
not part of the equation. Continue reading at: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_last_gasp_of_climate_change_liberals_20140831

About Me

I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.
Thomas Jefferson